The boots of the militia carried through the floor above, the sound of armed men inside a building that had become theirs, moving into the positions they had been ordered to hold.

Beorn had told them not to come down. The noise proved they were still up there.

He sat in the empty chair.

Coss watched him without changing expression. Both hands rested on the table. His hands did not move. Men under real threat moved their hands.

"You’ve been busy"

The warmth in his voice was real, in its way. It was the warmth of who found the situation interesting. "Everything falling apart in what, a few hours? I’d have given you at least a day, to be fair to myself."

"Beginner’s luck," Beorn said.

Coss smiled faintly. "Luck," he said, and the word carried something that was not sarcasm but had its edge.

He looked at Beorn’s hands, then at the flintlock pistol on his belt. "The sound those weapons made in the avenue. I heard it from upstairs. Truly breathtaking. I’m still wondering how you were able to produce those intrinsic designs."

"There are many things in Ashmark you didn’t know I had," Beorn said.

Coss’s fingers shifted slightly on the table, not reaching for anything, only changing into a new position.

"I suppose congratulations are in order," he said. "Ashmark is yours. One, singular drop of water in the large ocean that is the Badlands."

He gave Beorn a narrow look.

"And I think you understand who has the highest authority over this territory."

"I do," Beorn said.

The agreement seemed to land differently than Coss expected. He studied it for a moment. "Then you also understand."

He continued, "That what you’ve taken here is one point. The relationships beyond it, the supply chains, the capital connections, those do not live in Ashmark. They live in people. In what have nothing to do with whether you hold this particular city."

"I’m well aware." Beorn said. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

He kept his voice even. "The Merchant Archipelago, for instance. Senn, two contacts in the capital’s merchant district. The relationships you’re describing."

Something moved across Coss’s face that was not quite a change in expression. It was a recalculation behind composed features, visible only in the two seconds before he answered.

"Wulfric told you," he said.

"He was very helpful," Beorn said.

Silence followed. Coss looked at his hands, then back at Beorn, and the practiced warmth had a layer under it now that was not warmth.

"Then you’ll understand," he said, "that I won’t be coming with you."

He said it like a term in a contract, with no drama and no request hidden inside it.

A term. Ironclad.

Beorn looked at him across the table.

"The high quarter is ours. The slums are cordoned. The exits you had are gone."

He leaned forward slightly.

"The terms you’re describing do not have a foundation."

"The foundation," Coss said, "is in this room."

He set one hand flat on the table and turned his fingers toward the far wall.

He did not lift his hand. He did not turn his head. The gesture was the smallest version of itself that could still be understood.

The figure moved.

Her arms came out of the coat. Her hands were bare to the wrist, the fabric falling back from them, and the air between her hands and Beorn changed.

The distance through the room was shimmering, compressed, pulled apart in a new direction, the space itself behaving as though it had received an instruction.

Beorn’s hands tightened on the saber grip.

He looked at the figure’s hands and at the space between her and him, and then Aestrith’s field came up.

He felt it on his left as a physical force pressing outward from her position, gravity bending to a specific orientation.

The two magical forces met above the table at the center of the room. The collision was the opposite of loud, a low continuous pressure that came through the stone floor and the stone walls and the lamp flame, which bent sideways and held there, pulled at an odd slant that had nothing to do with the movement of air.

At the midpoint between the two women, where the fields met, the air brightened for a fraction of a second.

Then sparks, from the clash between the two forces grinding against each other, two domains pressing in an enclosed space.

Then the stalemate held, Aestrith’s gravity field locking the pressure at the midpoint, neither side advancing.

Both women were still. Aestrith had widened her stance for steadiness on the cold stone floor.

The figure’s hood had shifted under the strain of her output, the fabric moving when something other than air was affecting it.

Beorn looked at the stalemate, then at Coss.

Coss was looking at Aestrith. The warmth was gone from his face for the first time, replaced by the expression of a man encountering a variable he had not fully considered and was now rethinking his plans.

"No wonder. You are really full of surprises, prince." Coss said.

"So are you, Coss," Beorn said.

Coss looked back at him.

"I wonder what the capital would think of you being affiliated with a Sinbound."

"As if that was important to me," Beorn said.

The lamp slid two inches across the table.

The sealed correspondence case followed it. The papers at the table lifted at their corners, throw against the ceiling.

In the left wall, along the mortar between two courses of stone, a hairline fracture appeared that had not been there before, thin as a thread, running diagonally for six inches before stopping.

The figure’s output was increasing. Aestrith’s field increased to match it.

The sparks at the midpoint intensified, the interference between the two domains creating something neither would have made alone.

The figure’s hood was moving with the energy in the room, the drawstring tightening with each surge.

Then the string gave and the hood fell.

Her face was visible.

Mid-twenties. Strong features, shaped from endurance. Her jaw was sharp and her eyes were a flat brown, the kind that belonged to someone who had learned to look without showing the act of looking.

She was pale from the strain, the pallor arriving the same way Aestrith’s did when the cost was beginning to land. Her hair had been trapped under the hood and showed it, pressed flat on one side and loose on the other.

She was looking at Aestrith. Whatever she was reading there, she was using it to fight back.

Above the table, in the air where the two fields had been meeting, the air started to shimmer more strongly.

A crack opened, two inches long.

It had a tear in it. The lamp light passed through it at a wrong slant on the far side, the room briefly failing at that one point. The crack stopped at two inches and did not grow.

It did not close either.

Aestrith felt it before she looked at it. Beorn could tell by the change in her posture, not breaking or losing the stalemate, only expanding to include something that was not the figure against the wall.

Her breathing had changed. Her feet were set hard into the floor.

Coss was looking at the crack in the air.

His hands, for the first time since Beorn had entered the room, were fidgeting.